Wednesday, August 31, 2005

When British novelist GK Chesterton visited the Cape in the mid-nineteenth century, he commented it was a pity the Cape's poor cheeses were an inferior match for its fine wines. Boy, would he be surprised today. A cellar-door restaurant is de rigueur in a Cape winery portfolio - along with homegrown cheeses, olive oils, preserves, breads and branded winery caps, t-shirts and t-cloths.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

If you haven't found the Fumare: Law, Culture, and Catholicism...up in smoke blog yet, then click here now. Fumare now boasts a handful of contributors. Yesterday one contributor produced a post on Hilaire Belloc and the slowly forming American Belloc Society.

The popularity of cycling races just keeps growing and growing. Small wonder, because not only is it engaging TV, it recalls a remark by HG Wells who said, "Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future."

LifeSite has a special report triggered by the Man “Plague Species” exhibit in the London Zoo (see Eric's TDE post from Saturday). John Jalsevac begins his article quoting Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails: "See the animal in his cage that you built, are you sure what side you're on?... Are you sure what side of the glass you are?"

The root of his article begs us to read Chesterton:

But the unfortunate fact is that “evolution really is mistaken for explanation”, which G.K. Chesterton points in Everlasting Man, which is by far one of the best books on the question of Man, and which everybody ought to read immediately if they haven’t already. “It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read Origin of Species.”

Much like the Big Bang theory, the theory of Darwinian evolution creates the dangerous aura of The Answer, when it isn’t anything of the sort. It’s exactly the same monstrous fallacy so many made of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, making the ludicrous leap from the relativity of space and time to the relativity of morality, all to the absolute horror of Einstein.

However, contrary to mainstream reporting, being a “close-minded creationist”is not seen by many honest thinkers and believers as the only credible option to Darwinism. That Man may, in some mysterious, miraculous fashion, have resulted from a physical evolution of primates over a period of many, many thousands or millions of years, that led him to the point of coming into the full possession of his sublime and spiritual humanity is by all accounts possible. Remote, but possible, and all the more miraculous for its remoteness.

It seems quite reasonable that no matter how slow a miracle may happen, it still remains a miracle. Says Chesterton: “The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.”

...

Chesterton was fond of pointing out that we currently live, not in the age of common sense, but the age of “uncommon nonsense”. The man of uncommon nonsense—only too often a scholar of great acclaim—puts men and women into a cage and believes that he has proved something sublime. While the man of common sense visiting the zoo in the hope of glimpsing an exotic animal blushes on seeing an exotic dancer instead and promptly goes home to soothe away the distressing feeling that the world has gone completely loony with a drink and a Sinatra record.

"A lot of people think humans are above other animals. When they see humans as animals, here, it kind of reminds us that we're not that special,” said another visitor to the zoo, who was evidently suffering from temporary amnesia that caused him to forget the pyramids, the Panama canal, and the complete poetical works of Pope.

Monday, August 29, 2005

"So now we know. Women’s IQ is, on average, five points less than men’s. That is the conclusion of two researchers’ summaries of 57 academic studies on gender and intelligence in the British Journal of Psychology in November. . .

"All you need to know for pop psychology purposes is that Professor Richard Lynn and Dr Paul Irwing have found that there are three men to each woman with an IQ of more than 130 and 5.5 men for each woman with an IQ above 145. Oh, and the difference between the sexes really opens up only after the age of 14. . .

"As it happens, Lynn has not only established that men tend to be brighter than women, he has also controversially discovered that Europeans have a higher IQ than the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. And — lest you were working up a liberal ecstasy of embarrassment about it — he also found that the oriental peoples of east Asia have higher average intelligence by five IQ points than Europeans. So there.

"Faced with scholarship of this nature, I tend to take refuge in G K Chesterton’s brilliant little novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which a deposed president of Nicaragua argues about the merits of civilisation with an advocate of the same, an English civil servant called Barker. The former president sternly inquires of Barker whether he knows the best way to lasso a wild horse. To which the civil servant replies with dignity that he never catches wild horses and suggests that he sets very little store by such barbarian dexterity.

"Precisely, says the Nicaraguan. 'If the bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but nobody ever says, ‘This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a bedouin to teach him’.'

"The point is rather simple. It’s that it is easy to establish standards of worth by which people are found wanting without actually asking whether we are measuring the most important attribute for the business of existence. And when we set up IQ tests as the standard by which women are found inferior to men, we may indeed question whether a high IQ is all it’s cracked up to be."

Friday, August 26, 2005

Basement Man ("an average guy with a wife and daughter who lives and works in America") posted his impressions of GKC's What's Wrong with the World. Here is one snippet:

There are natural consequences to sex. Our attitude toward sex now is flippant. What if the consequence for whistling or lighting a cigarette were that an angel or genie were tied to our necks like supernatural balloons? Would we be so eager to perform these acts? Chesterton’s point is that sex has major consequences; it isn’t simply something we can do and forget — there are lasting impressions from the act.

One occasionally ended up feeling sorry for the academics. It must be rare enough for them to be addressing students who have actually read the text under discussion; and unheard of to have an audience who have all read it dozens of times. One speaker made the mistake of implying that Frodo only goes to the Undying Lands in spirit, and had to deal with quotes from the Silmarillion in the question and answer session.

It remains for the true master of Chestertoniana to list all the books that have been dedicated to GKC. At the head of this list, or near it, will be the great 1913 mystery novel, Trent's Last Case, by Chesterton's lifelong friend, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. (Yes, he's the originator of the clerihew verse form). The dedication reads, in part, "I dedicate this story to you because the only really noble motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it."

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Here are a few snippets from a recent article on Maurice Baring by Ralph McInerny:

It is a name one encounters in reading about others ... always it seems a background figure, in the picture, but standing, not seated, famous by association rather than achievement....He flourished in a time when the entertainment to be found in books occupied a far larger portion of people's lives than it does today. Would his essays now be wasted on the desert air of a televised talk show? Baring himself saw how "what is called Education" was depriving the world of readers....From youth he was given to triolets and later composed telegrams of them... He also exchanged verse letters with his dear friend Belloc.

Monday, August 22, 2005

A reader who browses through the fourteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations will learn on page 918 that the General Motors pavilion at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago ("A Century of Progress") was inscribed with this quotation from Tremendous Trifles (slightly misquoted): "The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder." On the next page of Bartlett's, readers are told that in a notebook dated 1945, John F. Kennedy ascribed to Chesterton the following: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up." This alludes to the idea expressed by Chesterton in the opening paragraph of "The Drift from Domesticity," which is chapter IV of The Thing.

Friday, August 19, 2005

Yesterday IgnatiusInsight.com reprinted a 1998 article by Dr. Janet Smith titled "Hot Water and Fresh Air: On Chesterton and His Foes."

I believed Chesterton labored so hard to debunk the foolishness of his times, because he knew that all of us, himself included, are prone to latch on to the trendy. In Orthodoxy, he lays out his own personal odyssey of discovering the truth and calls it an "elephantine adventure in pursuit of the obvious." He acknowledges, "I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it." For my part, I am with Chesterton in praying for the grace to recognize the obvious. I have seen too many get entangled in subtleties and nuances to the point where they become incapable of breathing fresh air and eventually asphyxiate themselves.

Perhaps reading Chesterton would be the cure, for he is always a breath of fresh air.

Janet Smith herself has worked tirelessly to debunk the foolishness of our times. She wrote Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later, edited Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader, and recorded Contraception: Why Not? - her talk that many thousands have heard. Go to One More Soul for more info on Dr. Smith.

Third Annual Southwest Regional Retreat of the C.S. Lewis Foundation and The Hill Country Institute for Contemporary Christianity

“Aslan on the Move: Narnia Revisited”

Date: November 18 – 20, 2005

Location: Camp Allen Episcopal Retreat Center, Navasota, Texas

...

This year’s retreat will feature commentary on C.S. Lewis’ wonderful collection of stories for both children and adults, The Chronicles of Narnia are a wonder of delight for both young and old, and, as in 2004, we will offer programs for both adults and children.

Our speakers for the adult portion of the weekend will be Dr. Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University and Dr. Paul Ford of St. John’s Catholic Seminary in Camarillo, California. They will lead us into the wonderful world of Narnia and explore the characters, themes and timely lessons Lewis developed in this Christian fantasy world, where Aslan moves and breathes unexpected life. You need only bring a desire to learn, live, and grow. Lewis believed we needed more good Christian stories to be told, and we can use his insights and skill to bless others as we learn about Christian storytelling with purpose and continue our own spiritual journeys.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

"I should think very little of a man who didn't keep something in the background of his life that was more serious than all this talking — something more serious, whether it was religion or only drink."

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

I am a 19 year old male University Student, studying Physics and Math. I am completely and utterly in love with the Catholic Church. I am a "Macaddict," though I do use windows for some work. One of my greatest heros is G.K. Chesterton, who gave me the inspiration for this blog. Something else you will see me write about a good deal is Firefly/Serenity. Firefly was a short lived T.V. show on Fox. Serenity is the film version which opens 9.30.05.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Before Monsignor Eugene Clark became embroiled in a sex scandal of his own, he made headlines in 2002 when he blamed gays for sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, Eastchester resident Philip DeFilippo is accusing Clark of having an affair with his wife, Laura DeFilippo, Clark's longtime secretary. The allegations surfaced in divorce papers filed last week in Westchester County Family Court....Clark has served on the boards of several organizations, including the G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture at Seton Hall University.

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity. We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot. And the more we approach the problems of human history with this keen and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind.

Monday, August 15, 2005

I haven't followed much hoopla about the upcoming Narnia movie -- only the few items that I've posted here. But this article is good; it talks about co-producer Douglas Gresham's relationship with C.S. Lewis.

Gresham knew C.S. Lewis (Jack) personally when he was a child; Douglas Gresham is one of two stepsons of C.S. Lewis from Lewis's marriage to Gresham's mother, Joy Davidman. One of Gresham's fondest memories of him was Jack's sense of humor and wit...."The one thing that is always lost in recollections of Jack in movies and biographies about Jack is his enormous humor and vibrancy of his wit. You couldn't be with Jack for more than five or ten minutes without roaring with laughter. One of the great hallmarks of the Inklings meetings was the gales of laughter that came as they discussed each other’s work," said Gresham.

Friday, August 12, 2005

Christopher Orr wrote August 9th at the New Republic Online about the Thin Man movies of the 1930s and 1940s. The six mystery films starred William Powell and Myrna Loy as the detectives Nick and Nora Charles. Orr has some insightful comments about Hollywood, social life, and drinking:

[T]hese days what is perhaps most striking about Nick and Nora is not their easy blend of comedy and drama or their balanced sexual dynamic, but rather their carefree booziness. In modern American movies, the consumption of alcohol is limited largely to fraternity pledges, lost souls, and the occasional Billy Bob Thornton character. The idea that discerning, well-adjusted adults would on occasion choose to have a few drinks in the company of like-minded friends is almost heretical unless it is accompanied by suitably catastrophic consequences — a fist-fight, adulterous affair, or car accident.

Some would argue, no doubt, that any onscreen hint that drinking can be fun must be avoided for the sake of the children — though how this problem is solved by limiting portrayals of the activity to plastered high-schoolers and collegians is not quite clear. Sadly, I suspect Hollywood's dim view of sociable drinking has just as much to do with its dim view of sociability. The activity that accompanies alcohol consumption most frequently, after all, is not wife-swapping or vehicular homicide but rather conversation, and conversation of a particular kind: banter, chitchat, idle musing, or witty repartee. With relatively few exceptions, American movies today have little use for talk that has no purpose beyond itself, that doesn't move the plot forward or reveal some hidden character trait but rather consists merely of two or more people taking pleasure in one another's company and inviting us to do the same, as the Charleses do with such genial ease. G. K. Chesterton once wrote that "Americans do not need drink to inspire them to do anything, though they do sometimes, I think, need a little for the deeper and more delicate purpose of teaching them how to do nothing." Were he alive today, I suspect he would find this observation more true than ever.

"It appears, then, that the two processes are going on side by side, the decline of Church membership and the decline of dogma; the evacuation of the pew and the jettisoning of cargo from the pulpit."

Ronald Knox (1927)

This passage shouldn't prompt me to refer to Knox as a prophet. He merely saw toward its beginning something that we see wholesale today: the religions (or sects or individual parishes) that water down their teachings lose members.

Alec Guinness, most famous for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi, played Father Brown in the 1954 film The Detective. Piers Paul Read's Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography was released June 21 by Simon & Schuster. Katherine Powers reviewed the biography at the Boston Globe.

Where Read is uniquely good and perceptive is in his treatment of Guinness's cruel tongue, his bullying — there is no other word for it — of his wife and son, his castigation of himself for his sins and inadequacies, his battle against existential bleakness, and his Catholicism. The last is of immense importance in the actor's life. Read (correctly, I'm sure) notes that Guinness's embrace of Catholicism in its English version had a snobbish element. ("After a few months in the arch-diocese of Archbishop Spellman," he wrote from New York, "I have a lot of sympathy with anti-Catholicism.") But his faith was primarily his hedge against despair. To quote what, according to Read, was his favorite passage from G. K. Chesterton, "The Church is the one thing that prevents a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time." Surely it is that contrariness that lay at the heart of Guinness's genius.

Eric Scheske at The Daily Eudemon, and blogfather of Chesterton & Friends, has created a hefty book meme and has tagged me for it. Mr. Thumos has cleverly called it the "Textual Defense Initiative (TDI)."

1. Name your three biggest non-reference books (excluding the Bible and text books).

2. Name your three biggest reference books.

3. Tag three others.

By “biggest,” we’re not looking for number of words. We’re looking for weight. Heft. Something you’d drop on invaders while defending a castle.

I own few hefty books. To stop an intruder I would push over a bookshelf.

Cervantes. Don Quixote. An English translation with lots of commentary. Monty Python of the early 1600s.

Honorable Mention (because they are loved by my children and are reasonably thick): Bill Bennett (ed.). Book of Virtues and The Moral Compass. These are great books to read aloud after dinner to children ages 2 to 102.

reference:

Orchard, Bernard et al. (eds.). A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture. Published by Nelson and Sons in 1951. I found my copy via www.abebooks.com. The bookplate shows that it was previously owned by a nunnery in California. Hopefully they tossed it because they already had plenty of other copies on hand.

Frederick Copleston. History of Philosophy, Book 1 (Vol 1-3).

I, too, had a "Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary" ... and it was huge. Guests would gasp when they saw it. But after several words could not be found in it, but only in my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the "Webster's" "Unabridged" was tossed into the trash.

Friday, August 05, 2005

Hillsdale College's Center for Constructive Alternatives is holding a conference entitled, "C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings" in September. Speakers include Walter Hooper, Gilbert Meilaender, and Thomas Shippey. All lectures are free. I plan to attend, since the College is only an hour from my house.

In his 1979 study of the Oxford Inklings, Humphrey Carpenter concludes that the mind of C.S. Lewis had two aspects, the poet and the Debater, and when the debater was in ascendancy, Carpenter says interestingly enough that Lewis showed the mark of Chesterton. [The Inklings, Houghton Mifflin, p. 221]

Thursday, August 04, 2005

"There are many kinds of sincerity and insincerity. When you say 'thank you' for the salt, do you mean what you say? No. When you say 'the world is round,' do you mean what you say? No. It is true, but you don't mean it. Now, sometimes a man ... really finds a thing he does mean. It may be only a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says more than he means — from sheer force of meaning it."

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

It's getting harder to find music-free zones these days. Libraries have held out, and most doctors' offices, the state ferries, and so on. But Italian restaurants have long piped in "That's Amore" to trick us into believing we're in Italy, to make us feel we're having an authentic Italian experience, even it it's fabricated in part by red-and-white-checked table covers and the crooning of Dean Martin, that old Italian from Steubenville, Ohio. As British essayist G.K. Chesterton said, music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the musician.

My experience with doctors' offices is that they usually have a television blaring CNN, Fox News, or Cartoon Network. Woutat deals with blaring televisions in his article as well. I agree with Eric who proposes adding Noisiness to the list of capital sins. Yep, right after Lust.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard, writes today in the L.A. Times:

The writer G.K. Chesterton once suggested that atheists were "balanced on the very edge of belief — of belief in almost anything." I was reminded of this critique last week by a report of a conversation between one of the would-be London bombers, Muktar Said Ibrahim, and a former neighbor of his in Stanmore, the suburb of North London where he grew up.

Americans tend to assume that what is going on in Europe today is a struggle between Islamic extremism and Western — or Judeo-Christian, if you will — tolerance. But this is only half right.

"He asked me," Sarah Scott said, "if I was Catholic because I have Irish family, and I said I didn't believe in anything. And he said I should. He told me he was going to have all these virgins when he got to heaven if he praises Allah. He said if you pray to Allah and if you have been loyal to Allah, you would get 80 virgins, or something like that."

Now, it is the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the notion, apparently a commonplace among jihadists, that a suicide bomber who successfully blows up a decent number of infidels is rewarded in heaven with 80 virgins. (Wouldn't you prefer, say, two desperate housewives?) But is it, I wonder, significantly stranger to believe, like Sarah Scott, in nothing at all?

What is an allegory? And who - I forget - is that lion supposed to represent? Finally, the book I've been needing is here...

C.S. Lewis & Narnia For Dummies is a plain-English guide that provides a friendly introduction to the master storyteller and Christian apologist, revealing the meanings behind the The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters as well as his other works. You will also discover how his life influenced his writings, more about his friendship with Tolkien and the Inklings, and why Lewis went from being a confirmed atheist to a committed Christian and how he addressed his beliefs in his writings.

Monday, August 01, 2005

About 1910, the Christian journalist and humorist G.K. Chesterton wrote a remarkably prophetic book, which accurately set forth all the fundamental social issues that would beset the oncoming 20th century. He called it, "What's Wrong With the World."

What was wrong, he contended, was that we so rarely asked what would be right. People were so focused on the ills of society, they deluded themselves into believing they had reached some kind of accord. In fact, they had not – and if they could ever bring themselves to project the kind of society they would regard as an ideal one, only then would they discover their irreconcilable discords.

"This is the arresting and dominant fact about modern social discussion," said Chesterton, "that the quarrel is not merely about the difficulties, but about the aim. We agree about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear each other's eyes out. We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad thing. We should not by any means all admit that an active aristocracy would be a good thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood, but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one. Everyone is indignant if our army is weak, including the people who would be even more indignant if it were strong."

A devoted beer drinker, Chesterton imagined himself standing alongside the fierce abstainer Lord Cadbury in front of what they would both amicably condemn as "the bad pub." However, he added, "It would be precisely in front of the good pub that the painful personal fracas between us would occur."

"Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that while we agree about the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses of them."

There is no better description of the current state of Canadian conservatism. We do not ask what would be right, because we fear the real divisions between us would quickly appear and prove irreconcilable. So we paper over the issues and feign a unanimity that isn't really there.